by no means extends directly to its phenomenon, not even in the case in which this reaches the highest made of its visibility, and thus does not extend to the rational animal endowed with individual character, _i.e._, the person. The person is never free although he is the phenomenon of a free will; for he is already the determined phenomenon of the free volition of this will, and, because he enters the form of every object, the principle of sufficient reason, he develops indeed the unity of that will in a multiplicity of actions, but on account of the timeless unity of that volition in itself, this multiplicity exhibits in itself the regular conformity to law of a force of Nature. Since, however, it is that free volition that becomes visible in the person and the whole of his conduct, relating itself to him as the concept to the definition, every individual action of the person is to be ascribed to the free will, and directly proclaims itself as such in consciousness. Therefore, as was said in the Second Book, every one regards himself _a priori_ (_i.e._, here in this original feeling) as free in his individual actions, in the sense that in every given case every action is possible for him, and he only recognises _a posteriori_ from experience and reflection upon experience that his actions take place with absolute necessity from the coincidence of his character with his motives. Hence it arises that every uncultured man, following his feeling, ardently defends complete freedom in particular actions, while the great thinkers of all ages, and indeed the more profound systems of religion, have denied it. But whoever has come to see clearly that the whole nature of man is will, and he himself only a phenomenon of this will, and that such a phenomenon has, even from the subject itself, the principle of sufficient reason as its necessary form, which here appears as the law of motivation,—such a man will regard it as just as absurd to doubt the inevitable nature of an action when the motive is presented to a given character, as to doubt that the three angles of any triangle are together equal to two right angles. Priestley has very sufficiently proved the necessity of the individual action in his “Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity;” but Kant, whose merit in this respect is specially great, first proved the coexistence of this necessity with the freedom of the will in itself, _i.e._, apart from the phenomenon,(69) by establishing the distinction between the intelligible and the empirical character. I entirely adhere to this distinction, for the former is the will as thing-in-itself so far as it appears in a definite individual in a definite grade, and the latter is this phenomenon itself as it exhibits itself in time in the mode of action, and in space in the physical structure. In order to make the relation of the two comprehensible, the best expression is that which I have already used in